The Buddhist View Of Life As A Dream

It is often heard from Buddhist teachers, that this life is nothing more than a dream and awakening no different in either case. Having studied lucid dreaming in a dedicated way for about two years I have to agree with this assessment. Let me make a couple of key points in this regard but importantly explain why this insight is of any practical use.

First of all, lucid dreaming is when you are dreaming but you know you are dreaming. You are fast asleep, dreaming and fully conscious. In order to learn how to have more lucid dreams, I read everything by Dr. Stephen LaBerge, joined his Lucidity Institute and practiced diligently. Dr. LaBerge has probably conducted more clinical research into the phenomenon of lucid dreaming than any other scientist. His book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, reviews the history of the phenomenon and provides a detailed training program to teach anyone how to have lucid dreams. Having followed that program I can assure you it works and I was able to conduct a variety of experiments while lucid dreaming.

What is lucid dreaming like? Think Neo in The Matrix. Whatever you expect and believe to be real will be real. I mean as real as the waking world. While lucid dreaming I would check to see if things had the same physical characteristics as the real world. Of course they did and in as fine a level of detail as I cared to examine. They did because I expected them to. However I learned to work with this. Can I pass through that wall over there? Bonk! Nope. Ah, change the mind. Its not a wall but a veil and there is another room on the other side. This time, no problem.

Because the training required ‘round the clock practices, I also became highly aware of the nature of my regular dreams and gained a heightened awareness of the nature of the waking state of consciousness. I became very aware of how the waking state was different or similar to the dream state. Here is the key insight: although the physical characteristics of things in the dream state are different than the waking state, the state of consciousness is no different.

Why do we not normally realize when we are dreaming, especially when such odd things happen? We go blithely along with whatever happens as long as it is not too frightening. The reason is that we are not in a different state of consciousness than when we are awake. When we are dreaming, just like when we are awake, we accept everything that happens as normal. Let me turn that around for its real significance to be seen; when you are awake, you are in the same state of consciousness as when you are dreaming.

We are aware of the random flow of events in dreams but suffer the illusion that our waking life is different. It is not. Our life, just like our dreams, is nothing more than a constant series of responses to completely random events. We do not perceive them as random because we view our lives from a certain perspective in space and time. Our lives are a momentary formation like a swirl in billowing smoke or an eddy in a stream. However because we view our lives from within that formation, we suffer the illusions of permanence, separateness, meaning and control. Yet just as a cloud forms from random events in the atmosphere, changes and then disappears due to the same forces, so do our lives.

Buddhism teaches that all things are temporary due to their dependence on other things for their existence. This is only a part of the truth however, and the less difficult part to accept. Not only are all things temporary but their creation, existence and dissolution are all driven by random events.

Just as lucidity enables you to awaken in a dream, so you can awaken to the waking dream. This is nature of The Buddha’s awakening. This is enlightenment and nirvana. He saw that all things are temporary. He stopped doing what everyone else was doing, which was grasping at temporary things in the belief they will make one happy. He saw that, ironically, it was in fact the grasping that caused the very unhappiness we seek to avoid. He saw that all things depended on other things for their existence and stopped believing things could be controlled and instead saw that they must instead be accepted. To resist reality only makes us suffer and to accept it is the only path to the end of suffering, or what we call happiness. This is “Right View” and this insight is the goal of all Buddhist practice.

So how does one awaken? Just as I trained with the program offered by Dr. Stephen LaBerge to awaken in my sleeping dreams, there is another program available to enable you to awaken to the waking dream. That program is called The Eight Fold Path.

Comments

“When we are dreaming, just like when we are awake, we accept everything that happens as normal. Let me turn that around for its real significance to be seen; when you are awake, you are in the same state of consciousness as when you are dreaming.”
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On the contrary, your consciousness shifts dramatically when in the dreaming state. While awake, you have enough sense to question whether or not you are dreaming. I do it often enough to know this. However, when in the dream state, your consciousness shifts into a more ‘retarded’ state of mind. Our dream body is still connected to our brain and is subject to its interpretation. The brain slows down to a theta state, which is why we don’t have the same capacity for logic and discernment in our dreams. It is only when we learn to disconnect from our brain (again, which has been slowed down from beta state to a much slower frequency of theta state – temporary mental retardation) and its interpretation of the dream scene and enter, fully conscious, into our astral or dream body, that we can become vividly lucid and know that our dreamscape is fake, even though it feels and looks vividly real to us. We can also use our lucid dreams as a means to induce an entirely different shift in consciousness whereby we experience what people erroneously refer to as an ‘Out Of Body Experience’. We are merely shifting our point of attention or awareness into the non-physical states.

In my opinion, training with the 8 fold path ‘program’ is just another way of grasping, believing things can be controlled, resisting reality. You could even state it’s taking all these things to extremes. Still I wish you goodluck.

The question-nothing too complex, you see. I am in search of more information upon the purple lotus and found myself here. Having read the post and comments thereafter this site has attracted my attention. I did not place the question here to begin with as I can see this particular post is of a different subject and some authors get irate about that sort of thing. If there is another post/blog with information about the lotus then do feel free to guide me there via a link or alternatively, move me to another post.

Ring that big brass temple bell Rick & wake us all up.
I can only respond to something as it rings true to my experience and your words do.
I too have read & employed Stephen LaBerge’s methods of lucid dreaming to my astonished amazement and had much the same experience you describe. Why have our elders and wise men & women not told us these things? Where has lucid dreaming been for the 60+ years I’ve been alive….so close but yet somehow hidden from our modern gaze?

I’ve practiced Zen for years and now am practicing under the flag of the Shambala School of Tibetan Buddhism. I agree that this is the “Right View” you speak of….the Heart Sutra & the Diamond Sutra all rolled up.

Delusion of appearances:
Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Upon first reading this, I was tempted to say what a load of New Age baloney but then my Buddhist equanimity kicked in and I did not say it. I do know now why you (Rick) were so reluctant to discuss or debate this with me in person, you had already committed your assertions to print.

“Our life is nothing more than a constant series of responses to random events.” This might be the world according to Rick Bateman but it is not the world according to the Buddha. Such concepts as random events, magic, divine intervention and even luck are not in the least compatible with Buddhist philosophy. The central teaching in Buddhism is the doctrine of Pratityasamutpada or “dependent origination”.

According to the Buddha; “When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.” Doesn’t sound like this is describing random events; (The Oxford English Dictionary defines “random” as: having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring without method or conscious choice; haphazard.). I perused numerous Buddhist sources and I could not find any justification for your assertion, in fact quite the opposite; Buddhist philosophy states that any event is the result of previous events and as such can not be random. I spent a whole day trying to be aware of all the events that I was “responding” to and I can say without equivocation that there was not a random event to be seen. I wish there had been one; like Lotto Max drawing my ticket for the 50 million. From the book “How to See Yourself as You Really Are” by H.H. the Dalai Lama; “An event is not under its own power but depends on many present causes and conditions as well as many past causes and conditions.” How is an event meeting those criteria even remotely “random”? I will let Matthieu Ricard have the last word on this (I assume you you know Matthieu Ricard; a Tibetan Buddhist monk since 1972, author of numerous books on Buddhism, and also being the French interpreter for H.H.). From his book “The Quantum and the Lotus”; “Even though phenomena lack reality, they do not happen at random.” and “The world is definitely not random or arbitrary.”

As long as I am on a roll. You say: “It is often heard from Buddhist teachers, that life is nothing but a dream and awakening no different in either case.” What teachers would this be and where do they say it and do they have a foreign accent? I think what the Buddha did say was to regard our life as a dream, not that our life was a dream. He did that to illustrate the illusory nature of everyday phenomena; just as dreams are an illusion so is the stuff of everyday life. Another important tenet of Buddhism is that of “emptiness” or in other words that all phenomena lack inherent existence. Seems that you have taken literally that which was meant to be taken metaphorically.

You say: “While lucid dreaming I would check to see if things had the same physical characteristics as the real world. Of course they did —–.”In the next paragraph you state “——– the physical characteristics of things in the dream are different than the waking state —-.” Which is it then; first you say they are the same and then you say they they are different? How can a dream have physical characteristics anyway? It’s a dream for Christs sake, nothing physical about it (unless you are having a nocturnal emission, I suppose). Step in front of a speeding bus in your dream and you will wake up in the morning no worse for the wear; do the same in real life and you will be fortunate to wake up in a hospital covered by a full body cast and swathed in bandages. The foregoing should pretty well establish which state has physical characteristics and which one does not, would you not agree?

You say: “——-; when you are awake, you are in the same state of consciousness as when you are dreaming.” Really? I think that it is a well established fact that we are not as “conscious” when we are sleeping, dreaming or not, as when we are awake. How many people die in house fires while dreaming away in their beds? Had they been in the “same state of consciousness” as when awake they would have headed for the nearest exit to escape the conflagration, would you not think?

You claim that: “Buddhism teaches that all things are temporary due to their dependence on other things for their existence. This is only part of the truth ——.” Ah, so the Buddha only got things partly right and now Rick Bateman is going to set the Buddha straight. “Not only are all things temporary but their creation, existence and dissolution are all driven by random events.” Talk about hubris!

Hi, quick question. I concur with you that there are no random events, all phenomena exist due to it’s various causes and conditions. How about our thoughts? Are they random? Coz often I find my own thoughts (sometimes negative) arising and then having to ask myself why did that thought arise?

Sir, you say, “How can a dream have physical characteristics anyway? ” As a long time lucid dreamer, I can tell you, the dream most certainly does have ‘physical characteristics’. Your ‘awakened’ perceptions are illusions of the mind, created from your 5 senses. In a lucid dream, if you touch the grass, you feel the cool dampness, the slightly rough tug of the texture, and so on. It is just as real, as waking experience. So how is this not physical? If is a sensation perceived, as surely as any perceived sensation you receive in waking life from your 5 senses.

Truly a wonderful post. I will show this to people when they ask what Buddhism is about now haha. It covers all the essentials. I love the idea of explaining to people that life is but a lucid dream. This makes me want to get more into lucid dreaming techniques, although I do often have lucid dreams already. Love the allusion to the clouds, just like “the stream you enter today is not the stream you entered yesterday.” dreams can show that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” thank you for the post.

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Rick Bateman

Rick has been studying and practicing Buddhism since 2000. At that time he joined a local Rinzai Zen Buddhist temple and attended regular meditation practices, teachings and retreats. He is neither a Buddhist monk, ... Read Full Profile